Like many people, I have a fondness for music....in fact that is an understatement, I couldn't live life without music in it. I love rock, metal, pop, blues...pretty much all-sorts. But although I don't consider myself to have OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), when it comes to organising my digital music, I most certainly do.
When I first started putting music files on my PC, I didn't understand what I was doing. I fired up the software that was installed - Windows Media Player (WMP) - put in a CD and hit the 'rip' button. It was brilliant, music to listen to on the computer whenever I wanted it. What I hadn't realised was that WMP had kindly ripped my music in the proprietary 'Windows' format of Windows Media Audio (WMA). But this wasn't apparent for some time.
I've owned various early MP3 players, but one of them mysteriously wouldn't play the files I put on it.....eventually I figured out it was because it would only play .MP3 files. Of course it was at this point I realised that I hadn't been ripping to MP3 format. Then my wife bought me an iPod Touch and along came iTunes and its default .M4A Apple format. This time I was much wiser though, and made sure it's default ripping setting was set to .MP3 before it started. However, what I hadn't bargained for when it imported all my music, was it creating a .M4A version of every .WMA file as it went along. Brilliant, now I had two copies of loads of my music taking up valuable hard drive space. Yes, I know I could have read the manual before I started, but honestly, who does that :-)
So time ticked by and my music collection grew and grew and got more and more disorganised. So I decided to take decisive action, and convert all my .WMA tracks into MP3. It took blooming ages, but over the course of quite a few weeks I did it. At the same time, I discovered that my tracks didn't all have the correct album art, artist name or album name. So I went about creating the correct ID3 tags for all my files in both WMP and iTunes. It took time, but it was all worth it in the end, if only for viewing Cover Flow on the iPod Touch.
So coming bang up to date, the latest project is to sort out all those M4A copies of the WMA tracks iTunes created all those years ago. This could be as easy as just deleting the iTunes music folder on my computer, but my OCD wouldn't let me do this....just as well as it turns out. Over the late May bank holiday weekend, I started the process and found all sorts of anomalies but I'm getting there. In a couple of weeks I hope to have a library of just MP3 tracks that both WMP and iTunes libraries point to and can play seamlessly. The other advantage is that any player I use will play any file I have, for instance I have a memory stick full of music in the car which will only play MP3 files, a Sony Walkman MP3 player which I don't think plays WMA files etc. etc.
Then there a couple of other niggles. The memory stick I use in the car, is immediately wiped by WMP if I try to use it to sync files, I've had two frustrating sessions of time-wasting with it and the only reliable piece of software that seems to work with the memory stick is Winamp. So I have 3 music libraries to keep up to date, WMP for the Sony, Winamp for the car and iTunes for the iPod. I'm a fool to myself, there must be an easier way!
Then of course there is the bit-rate argument, what is the best. I don't know a definitive answer to that, but I use 192kbps. That seems to give the best balance between file size and decent sound quality. However the audiophile's amongst you will be shouting "lossless" but I'm afraid I haven't got either the hard drive/MP3 player/memory stick space for it or the pain of re-ripping my entire music CD collection. If I ever do buy a music streaming device for my house (I'd love a Sonos system) then 192 it will have to be.
Then, as if that weren't enough there is the project to convert all my Vinyl to MP3. That project has stalled somewhat because it takes so long. I am pretty pleased with the Ion USB record deck I bought off eBay to do the work, but it is going to take ages. Never mind, the vinyl isn't going anywhere.....
So that is my digital music musings for the moment, a high workload, but I really enjoy trawling through it all and it helps me to rediscover music that otherwise would get forgotten about.
Cheers for now, Carl
